[rramadass]

> but I find "cloud" hard to get into for some reason

This is because there are too many moving pieces in the System. Add the domain jargon and intentional marketing/sales obfuscation and everything becomes overwhelming. I have a background in Applications/Networking/Protocols and i still find the whole "Cloud" domain confusing/difficult. After doing some research i came across this book which was very helpful for my own study. It gives you the overall "big picture view" along with some short code/usage snippets for each component. You can then followup with specific AWS/GCP/Azure books as needed.

You should also study Martin Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive Applications along with this - https://dataintensive.net/